Brussels, 3 July 2015
Hugues Brun (ULB) has recently been elected as Muon physics object group co-convener by the CMS collaboration board. He will start his two-year mandate in september 2015. From September he will take over the leadership of a team of over 100 researchers on a project at Cern, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Muons are charged particles that are almost stable and traverse the entire CMS detector. They are very clean signatures of all kinds of important physics processes, from studies of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson to studies of beauty meson decays and CP violation, and also for physics beyond the standard model. The detection of muons combines the inner tracker and the outermost detectors of CMS, the muon chambers.
Hugues Brun has contributed to the development of muon triggers in CMS in preparation of the high-energy LHC run at 13 TeV, called Run 2. He will now co-supervise all aspects of muon reconstruction and selection for a large part of the LHC Run 2 (2015-2018). His mandate also includes the preparation of very high LHC luminosities foreseen beyond 2025.
The computer system used by the Compact Muon Solenoid for the selection of muons, (the selection algorithms and hardware are called a trigger), is based underground besides the detector in the rooms that can be seen behind Brun.
The Interuniversity Institute for High Energies, IIHE (ULB-VUB), was created in 1972 at the initiative of the academic authorities of both the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Its main topic of research is the physics of elementary particles. The present research programme is based on the extensive use of the high energy particle accelerators and experimental facilities at CERN (Switzerland) and DESY (Germany) as well as on non-accelerator experiments at the South Pole. The main goal of this experiments is the study of the strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions of the most elementary building blocks of matter. All these experiments are performed in the framework of large international collaborations and have led to important R&D activities and/or applications concerning particle detectors and computing and networking systems.
Research at the IIHE is mainly funded by Belgian national and regional agencies, in particular the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) en het Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) and by both universities through their Research Councils.